Splitting your Library into two

If you’re anything like me, you have a crap load of tunes, spanning more than 40GB of space. This, by no means, fits on my laptop with the other 40GB of school work, photography, and, now, professional work. So, that limits me to only listening to tunes when my external hard drive is plugged in. Or does it?

Tunes to go

By splitting my library into two, I have a subset of my music stored on my personal laptop, and the whole set on the external. That way, when I am away from my external, I still have music, and when I am home, I still have the benefit of all my music, all without having to re-copy and move around my iTunes folder every time. How, you ask?

Start Over

Yes, thats the sad part, all my playlists, ratings, and smart playlists were lost in the making of this. I listen to my iPod a lot, which updates my star ratings, so it’s not a horrible loss. In order to accomplish this, follow the following tutorial:

Backup your Library. This is an essential step.
Create a new Library with iTunes
Create two playlists: “External Music”, and “Tunes to go”
Separate your external music source, moving the music you want on your powerbook to the powerbook’s Hard drive.
Tell iTunes *not* to manage the location of your music, nor to organize it. This step is what makes this trick work.
Drag and drop the music from your Powerbook onto the “Tunes to go” playlist.
Drag and drop the music from your External Hard drive onto the “External Music” playlist.
Enjoy

These steps are very simplified, and will eventually be accompanied by pictures and such, but hey, you gotta start somewhere.